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Shop Talk: Meet 3017 Commerce!

We’ve witnessed a lot of progress at our project this week. From our main building’s new storefront to the final demolition details being hammered out in our second building, we’re finally seeing some big changes.

If you’ve been following our retail journey, then you know the second building on our property was acquired by the former owners in the 80s because it came with a large parking lot that they needed for their employees. They never used the 1,800 square foot space, only the large lot. So they leased it out to a soup kitchen for the homeless that occupied the space until we purchased the three-parcel piece of property.

The soup kitchen jam-packed the building floor to ceiling with makeshift walls and compartments to house their products, supplies and even a couple studio apartments for employees. So when we toured it, we had no idea what the space would look like once cleared out and cleaned up.

Our demo was officially completed Tuesday and the building is a dream! The brick is in pristine condition (thanks to those makeshift walls!) and the prettiest salmon color. The rafters are the perfect mix of industrial and sculptural. The natural light — even with crappy old beat up windows — is ethereal and gorgeous. And the little details from the inset entryway to back garage door infuse the perfect amount of interest and cool.

We have a ton of work ahead of us! For one, we need to decide what the heck we are going to do with this space. Now that we can see the bones the ideas are really swirling!

We believe to the bottom of our toes that our neck of the woods in Deep Ellum needs food. We also think the neighborhood in general needs a feminine culinary concept that caters to our customer.

So, we’re currently interviewing various operators, companies and concepts about possibly going inside. We’re also considering taking on the project ourselves once we get our main building up and running. All I know is that there must be a concept that lets me hang out in this space all the time! It’s so unique and has so much potential to be a real gem for Dallas!

One of the best parts is the back patio off the garage door. There’s at least 600 square feet of open air space under 100-year old Elm trees. I can already see people mingling and eating under the giant limbs and then lingering over to the store or studio for a fun workshop. Ahhhh… it’s all going to be so amazing!

Now that demolition is over, we are actually working on the front facade so it coordinates with our main building and looks nice for our grand opening. We’ll work on the interior down the road once we’re open…

Our main building is really humming along. The interior walls go up any day and HVAC work is about to start. I’m currently ordering appliances and hardware. We’re using the soup kitchen’s old industrial kitchen sink in our studio space. I love the look and history of this cool piece. It has three large basins and is perfect for our messy workshops and art classes. I’m so happy we were able to honor the old building a bit!

We’re starting to design exterior signage and work with the city on permits for vertical signs to hang from the brick. We’re starting to lay out the framework for all the logistics inside our main space from retail hours and workshop menus to furniture layouts and ordering product.

I’ve started to pick some initial color choices for the exterior of the main building, too. Tomorrow I actually plan to test my favorite and see how we like it. Stay tuned to learn what color we’re thinking!

Want to see more of our new space and store? Check out the rest of our “Shop Talk” blog series and #fsshoptalk on Instagram!